1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to aircraft and in particular to a method and apparatus for providing weather information for a trajectory of an aircraft. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to a method and apparatus for dynamically selecting three or four dimensional weather information for use in planning and updating flight trajectories.
2. Background
Weather information is used both during the planning and execution of flight operations. Planning flight operations results in the creation of flight plans. Flight plans are used to document basic information such as departure and arrival points, estimated time en route, various waypoints the aircraft must traverse en route, information pertaining to those waypoints, such as altitude and speed, information relating to legs of the flight between those waypoints, and aircraft predicted performance. This type of flight plan may be used to construct a flight trajectory including the various legs of the flight, which are connected to the various waypoints along the route. This flight trajectory may include a lateral trajectory defined in the horizontal plane and a vertical trajectory defined in the vertical plane.
Weather information for the route between the departure and arrival points, including information about forecasted weather for the various waypoints along the route, may affect a flight trajectory. For example, if incorrect weather is forecasted for a particular waypoint along the route of the flight plan, certain predictions for the flight path may become inaccurate, such as speed, fuel consumption, and time en route.
Additionally, revision of a flight plan may include deleting or adding waypoints, modifying the position of waypoints, or modifying the characteristics pertaining to the waypoints or legs between the waypoints, characteristics such as speed, time, or altitude, for example. The characteristics for various waypoints or legs between waypoints may include weather bands. A weather band is a collection of weather information for a specific geospatial point, such as a specific altitude or a specific three or four dimensional point in space. Weather information may include factors such as temperature, pressure, humidity, turbulence, wind speed, and wind direction.
Ground operation centers may identify and send weather bands to an aircraft for use in determining how weather may affect flight trajectory calculations. The weather bands identified may be based on current or predicted weather or flight plans, or may be default weather bands non-specific to a particular flight trajectory. Often, actual weather may impact a flight trajectory where the actual weather differs from the predicted weather used to calculate the predicted flight trajectory. Additionally, different factors en route may cause an aircrew to modify the flight plan and the weather information from the ground operation center, loaded during preflight, may no longer be accurate or up-to-date for the modified flight plan. Inaccurate or dated weather information can result in inefficiencies for flight operations, such as an increase in fuel consumption and emissions or delay in flight time, for example.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method and apparatus that overcomes one or more of the issues described above as well as possibly other issues.